Consulting Chaos
Engineer

Michael has been involved
in the Starship Titanic project longer than anyone else. Since 1989 (the
Summer of Synchronised Shouting And Weeping) in Juan-les-Pins, actually,
when Douglas Adams first explained the
idea and he said it sounded fine but hadn't a hope in hell of actually
happening.

He was the original
Script Editor on the project. It was a silly job-title, really. What it
meant was spending the spring of 1996 sitting with Douglas on The Digital
Village's agreeable sun-deck overlooking London, shouting and weeping.
This was known as "the creative process" and involved making
remarks like "I'll tell you a really good way to puree the flock
of starlings," and "Why don't we just make them tear his head
off?" and "What bloody parrot? You never mentioned a parrot,"
and "So, hang on, what's the objective of the game?"

He does other things,
too. Well, you'd have to, really. He's a columnist for the London Independent
on Sunday and The Observer; writes about high-tech stuff for the Daily
Telegraph; is cultural critic for the New Statesman; and keeps claiming
to have finished a book about flying around the Australian Outback in
a ricketty old Cessna 182, which will be out this winter ha ha ha.

He is a pilot, harpsichordist,
snappy dresser, part-time consulting physician, red-hot lover and self-deluding
old goat, but what he's proudest of is playing the organ part in "A Whiter
Shade of Pale" alongside Gary Brooker, who wrote the song.

Michael Bywater lives
in a disintegrating 18th-century apartment in central London with a bad
yellow-eyed woman, 86 pairs of spectacles and a wardrobe of fine Savile
Row suits, several of which are paid for. He owns a pair of crocodile
shoes and you would know him if you saw him.